THAT once down-to-earth Martin Mullaney, helpful in his car-designing and Camra days, now a city councillor and ‘chair’ of some high falutin’ council committee, is excited.

THAT once down-to-earth Martin Mullaney, helpful in his car-designing and Camra days, now a city councillor and ‘chair’ of some high falutin’ council committee, is excited.

He’s just heard that Brum is in with a chance of becoming the City of Culture in 2013 that could bring the Baftas, the Brit Awards and MTV Awards to our city and its arty partners.

“Brilliant,” was the word he used. And “lots to offer as a city” was mentioned.

Yes, that’s right. Birmingham where 18 children have died from neglect or abuse in the last handful of years, 16 of the mites known to our Social Services department.

That’s Birmingham, a city of such intermingling culture, that neighbours looked the other way when starving little Khyra Ishaq stood in a garden in her underclothes on a freezing night.

That’s Birmingham where a troupe of ineffectual and lazy city employees decided a dopey-looking mother and her lover where fit to educate their children in a home that ‘didn’t seem to have many books’.

That’s Birmingham, so cultured that an irresponsible and ignorant birth father could leg it to be with his second “wife” because he’d recently converted to Islam but wasn’t sufficiently intelligent to understand the strictures.

As if this isn’t outrageous enough, old people are being shunted from care homes here, away from those among whom they’d expected to end their days: the reason, we’re told, is that their current homes ‘don’t meet modern standards’.

Right now, the shadow of Khyra hangs heavy over the Council House. And which well-paid department head could even remember the name of smiling Toni-Ann Byfield, say, shot by drug-dealers while in Birmingham’s care because an idle social worker couldn’t be bothered to check the little girl’s paternity?